- Raster-Noton's Unun series aims to present "musical diamonds in the rough," and has featured early productions from NHK and Grischa Lichtenberger. The label's latest find is young Canadian Jesse Osborne-Lanthier, who has released on Where To Now? and Rabit's Halcyon Veil. Unalloyed, Unlicensed, All Night! was inspired by "EDM, big-room house, trance and online production tutorials"—in other words, the zones where dance music becomes a standardised, prepackaged consumer product. In abstracting this material, Osborne-Lanthier calls to mind other young dance music interrogators. But where Lorenzo Senni distills trance's euphoria, and Gábor Lázár finds the geometric grace in dance music's repetitive rhythms, this EP is rougher in execution and more ambiguous in its intent.
Sometimes Osborne-Lanthier rips classic dance music signifiers from their context. On "Blackwell Dynonetics," it's trap snares and glossy trance stabs, which skitter and lurch across a confused scree of other material. On "Lick And A Promise," it's bass wobbles and a detuned hoover synth—to enhance the panic in its ascending loop, Osborne-Lanthier slowly cranks up the tempo from 120 BPM. Both tracks follow roughly the same structure, in which loops are steadily layered into an ever denser rhythmic mulch.
This feels clumsy at times, but the overall effect, a kind of pummelling brutality, matches the ugly glory Osborne-Lanthier seems to find in his materials. The effect is pronounced on "Integrated Sensor Is Structure." Layers of glitchy, angular percussion yank awkwardly against each other, before a huge reverb detonation heralds a midpoint breakdown, tipping the focus onto a tense synth drone. The EP's best track might be the simplest. "The Zika Slam" is a full-frequency bass throb somewhere between a souped-up car engine and a swarm of CGI hornets.
TracklistA1 Blackwell Dynonetics
A2 The Zika Slam
B1 Integrated Sensor Is Structure
B2 Lick And A Promise